1 Vernon: You need to get to Berlin in 1933. Investigate and stop any damage to history.
2 Julie: Unfortunately the US Government doesn't have access to any time travel technology yet, so you'll have to find your own way there.
3 Man in Black: No problem. I know just the Martian robot and slack-jawed college student who can assist. Not that they exist, mind.
4 Vernon: And the public thought contributing US funds to the Large Hadron Collider would be a waste of money...

Think about it. A large international cooperative effort to build an enormous machine capable of wielding unfathomable energies?

It's gotta be a time travel project.

Aside: I was hoping to find a well-known TV series based on the premise of a large internationally funded project to build a timetravel device, so that I could link to it with the phrase, "Sound familiar?"

But when I searched, and also asked various sci-fi geeks, I came up blank. The closest hit was TimeWars, a fairly obscure series of novels that probably only a handful of readers would have heard of.

It seems instead that popular time travel series are all based on the premise that time travel is a top secret project funded by a single government. Not something that is openly shared between cooperating powers. I guess that says something about the society we live in.

EDIT: Of course, readers came up with something. Steins;Gate [sic, punctuated with a semi-colon] is a novel, manga, anime, and computer game based on the premise that a very thinly disguised version of the CERN Large Hadron Collider (it's being built by SERN in the story) is, in fact, an international time travel project!